In an article, published by C.M. Schroeder on pages 91-97 of the Jan. 1978 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal(Vol. 57, No. 1), and entitled "Accurate Silicon Spacer Chips for an Optical Fiber Cable Connector", the author discloses an arrangement for optically splicing two groups of optical fibers by providing for each group a connector comprising a stack of silicon chips. Each chip has on both its sides a set of spaced parallel "V" grooves registering (except for those on the outside stack faces) with the grooves of an adjacent chip to define a plurality of fiber-aligning channels which extend through the stack, and in which channels are received the end sections of the fibers in the corresponding group. The splicing of the fibers in the two groups is effected by butting the two stacks end to end so as to produce as close as possible to an exact alignment between the fibers in one stack and the corresponding fibers in the other.
The mentioned arrangement has been successful in producing optical fiber splices having relatively low loss due to misalignment of the fibers at the splice. The scheme has the deficiencies, however, that, while the use of silicon chips as the carriers for the fiber channel producing "V" grooves permits those grooves to be located on the chip with great accuracy to promote the exact aligning of fibers to be optically spliced, such chips are too costly to lend themselves to extensive commercial use. Moreover such chips are so fragile as to make their use inconvenient in interconnecting optical fibers in the field. Aluminum chips would not have such deficiencies, but the author points out that aluminum chips could not be manufactured repeatedly with the high dimensional accuracy required. Indeed, it is acknowledged in the article that even the silicon chips described therein had thickness variations which were contributions to splice loss.